Causes and consequences of pair‐bond disruption in a sex‐skewed population of a long‐lived monogamous seabird

• Published in: Ecological Monographs
• Main Authors: Sun, Ruijiao, Barbraud, Christophe, Weimerskirch, Henri, Delord, Karine, Patrick, Samantha C., Caswell, Hal, Jenouvrier, Stephanie
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: unknown
• Published: Ecological Society of America 2022
• Subjects: bycatch; capture–mark–recapture; divorce; life-history outcomes; Markov chain models; sex-biased; vital rates; wandering albatross; widowhood; Diomedea exulans; Wandering Albatross
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/1912/29132

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Sun, R., Barbraud, C., Weimerskirch, H., Delord, K., Patrick, S., Caswell, H., & Jenouvrier, S. Causes and consequences of pair‐bond disruption in a sex‐skewed population of a long‐lived monogamous seabird. Ecological Monographs, (2022): e1522, https://doi.org/10.1002/ecm.1522. Many animals form long-term monogamous pair bonds, and the disruption of a pair bond (through either divorce or widowhood) can have significant consequences for individual vital rates (survival, breeding, and breeding success probabilities) and life-history outcomes (lifetime reproductive success [LRS], life expectancy). Here, we investigated the causes and consequences of pair-bond disruption in wandering albatross (Diomedea exulans). State-of-the-art statistical and mathematical approaches were developed to estimate divorce and widowhood rates and their impacts on vital rates and life-history outcomes. In this population, females incur a higher mortality rate due to incidental fishery bycatch, so the population is male-skewed. Therefore, we first posited that males would show higher widowhood rates negatively correlated with fishing effort and females would have higher divorce rates because they have more mating opportunities. Furthermore, we expected that divorce could be an adaptive strategy, whereby individuals improved breeding success by breeding with a new partner of better quality. Finally, we posited that pair-bond disruptions could reduce survival and breeding probabilities owing to the cost of remating processes, with important consequences for life-history outcomes. As expected, we showed that males had higher widowhood rates than females and females had higher divorce rates in this male-skewed population. However, no correlation was found between fishing effort and male widowhood. Secondly, contrary to our expectation, we found that divorce was likely nonadaptive in ...